Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Exposing wine to air—a process referred to as letting the wine “breathe”—triggers two critical processes, namely oxidation and evaporation. Wine is made up hundreds of organic compounds and, in general, the volatile ones constitute the less desirable notes. Exposure to air allows these undesirable compounds to evaporate faster than the desirable, aromatic and flavorful ones, leaving behind a wine that is smoother and more appealing. Two particular categories of compounds that tend to reduced with aeration, include sulfites, which are generally added to wine to prevent oxidation and microbial activity, and sulfides, which are naturally occurring. Both can negatively impact the smell (or “bouquet”) as well as flavor of the wine. Likewise, excess ethanol notes can be reduced with aeration.
As the wine “breathes”, it will also begin to oxidize and the flavors and aromas will flatten out. The more dense and concentrated a wine is, the more it will benefit from aeration and the longer it can go before beginning to fade. A decanter has been traditionally used to accomplish aeration but can be time consuming: while older, more full-bodied red wines, and even some white wines, are improved after 25 to 30 minutes, intensely tannic or younger red wines may need 1-3 hours to achieve optimal results. Accordingly, there are many aerating devices and methods available in the marketplace offering means to accelerate the process.
Of the currently available methods, some involve actively introducing air into the wine bottle, for example with a aeration element or “bubble” such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,595,104 (Delaplaine). Others devices attempt to provide a greater exposure to surrounding air while the wine is being poured; see, for example, the Venturi apparatus described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,841,584 (Sabadicci et al.). Still others attempt to agitate the wine, for example by means of a stirring mechanism that is either inserted into the original bottle or a separate decanter. For example, wine stirrers that use a small rotating magnetic stir bar to “swirl” and aerate are known in the art, as exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 6,332,706 (Hall) and U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2015/0314253 (Cysewski et al.) and 2015/0329809 (Cifaldi). However, these “magnetic stirrers” have a number of drawbacks.
To prepare solutions, magnetic mixers and stirrers have been used by the scientific community in chemistry and biology and in academic and industrial laboratories for decades. The first U.S. Patent titled “Magnetic Stirrer”, U.S. Pat. No. 2,350,534, was issued in 1944 and included a coated stir bar. In terms of the critical components, little has changed since then. Namely, an industrial or laboratory grade magnetic stirrer includes three primary elements: a flat-topped housing (referred to in the art as the “stir plate”) that includes internal rotating drive magnet(s), a coordinating flat-bottomed vessel (such as a flask or beaker), and a small magnetic stir bar. In use, the magnetic stir bar is placed in the vessel containing the liquid or solution of interest. Then, the two are placed on the stir plate. Activation of the drive magnet(s) in the stir plate causes the corresponding magnetic stir bar to rotate and thereby generate a mass of whirling, swirling fluid referred to in the art as a “vortex”, which, in turn, causes the fluid to be mixed or stirred.
In the context of magnetic stirring systems, the magnetic stir bar must properly “coupled” with the corresponding drive magnet. However, calculating the attractive force between two magnets is, in the general case, an extremely complex operation, as it depends on the shape, magnetization, orientation and separation of the magnets. Furthermore, the coupling or magnetic attraction of the stir bar to the drive magnet is very fragile and depends on a few variable parameters like positioning center of the magnetic schematic, RPM of the motor, viscosity of the fluid, and length of the stir bar, etc. Accordingly, centering the vessel, and more particularly the magnetic stir bar freely moving in the fluid contained therein, on the stir plate is critical to functionality. However, even when the plate has a printed target directly over the center to help find it, this is not an easy task. Moreover, as magnetic attraction force is very sensitive to the distance or separation between two magnets and exponentially reduces with distance, even small errors in alignment can result in the stir bar being decoupled, or “spun out”. Thus, conventional systems recommend that the stirring speed be incrementally increased, very slowly, until the desired vortex pattern is achieved.
In the magnetic wine aerators of the prior art such as exemplified by Hall, Cysewski, and Cifaldi referenced above, the stir bar is unattached and thus allowed to move freely around the bottom of the vessel in a potentially distracting manner. However, other disadvantages also arise. For example, as wine is poured out of the container, the unsecured stir bar has a high likelihood of falling out of the vessel where, at best, it may be lost (thereby rendering useless the entire system) and, in a worse case, constitute a significant choking hazard. More critically, such systems tend to be plagued by the problem of “spin out” discussed above. In particular, the horizontal orientation of magnetization along the length of the stir bar, along with its relatively small size and the relatively low magnetic energy of its constituting material, contribute to a weak magnetic coupling force which, in turn, makes decoupling much more probable and problematic. While low speeds tend to reduce decoupling, they are incapable of generating a vortex of sufficient surface area in a large volume vessel, especially when using small stir bars such as described in the prior art. Furthermore, due to the size, shape and Teflon-coated AlNiCo construction, conventional stir bars tend to readily demagnetize, particularly when separated from the magnet assembly of the stir plate for any length of time.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an improved magnetically-driven wine aerating system that solves these and other problems of the prior art.